Implicit Casts for Arithmetic Operators

CASSANDRA-11935 introduced arithmetic operators, and alongside these came implicit casts for their operands. There is a semantic decision to be made, and I think the project would do well to explicitly raise this kind of question for wider input before release, since the project is bound by them forever more.
In this case, the choice is between lossy and lossless casts for operations involving integers and floating point numbers. In essence, should:
(1) float + int = float, double + bigint = double; or
(2) float + int = double, double + bigint = decimal; or
(3) float + int = decimal, double + bigint = decimal
Option 1 performs a lossy implicit cast from int -> float, or bigint -> double. Simply casting between these types changes the value. This is what MS SQL Server does.
Options 2 and 3 cast without loss of precision, and 3 (or thereabouts) is what PostgreSQL does.
The question I’m interested in is not just which is the right decision, but how the right decision should be arrived at. My view is that we should primarily aim for least surprise to the user, but I’m keen to hear from others.
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